Mak 2014

Bonnie Mak, "Archeology of a Digitization"

Mak, “Archaeology”

digitization is a product of human labor; digitizations as palimpsests

STC: Pollard and Redgrave; enumerative bibliography of surviving editions of pre-1641 English printed books – not complete, just waht could be found; revision begun in 1949 and finished around 1980; “unevenness in execution”; conceved as a prepatory list form the start

EEBO based on STC but not exact overlap

STC editors were transparent about gaps, process; EEBO is not

“In erasing markers of the processes of its own construction, for instance eliding the role of the ESTC, EEBO fashions a porous boundary between the database and the STC. Main- taining this close and ambiguous relationship garners for EEBO a kind of authority by association, for thus entwined, criticisms of the database could be construed as an attack on the bibliographical monument of the STC.” (1517)

approaching remediations of EEBO as “residue of hand, machine, and time”

UMI, University Microfilms International; Eugene Power, began microfilming in late 1930s; part of imagined publication-on-demand service; first microfilmed individual books, then began doing so on 100-foot rolls with 20-30 books each • “Because many disparate books were now conjoined on the same film, the physical reconfiguration necessitated a concomitant change in the identification and organization of the materials.” (1518) • filming was supposed to be chronological by year and alphabetical by author, but exceptions had to be made due to uneven delivery, etc. • worried that WW2 would interrupt his fledgling biz (had 16 institutional subscribers) and scholars were concerned about preservation of books and manuscripts • June 1940, decided to produce microfilm and shift operations to America; funds from Rockefeller grant • began microfilming intelligence docs, too • women crucial in these projects • Power gained access to high-quality equipment usually reserved for fed gov’t

ProQuest now manages EEBO, translation to digital images

originally bitonal digital scans; 2012 on, they are grayscale

“The facsimile is designed to imitate, to emulate, to reproduce; it seduces readers into overlooking the physical differences between the reproduction and its exemplar, and nowhere more acutely than in the digital environment, where the material incongruities between codex and computer should be most evident.” (1519) “The facsimile is designed to imitate, to emulate, to reproduce; it seduces readers into overlooking the physical differences between the reproduction and its exemplar, and nowhere more acutely than in the digital environment, where the material incongruities between codex and computer should be most evident.” (1519) Text Creation Partnership – outsourced transcription of texts in SGML Latour, construction of scientific knowledge – point of stabilization when an assertion becomes authoritative and incorporated into large body of knowledge by others; Mak suggests EEBO-TCP may be at that point

“The elision of the contingencies that are always entangled in processes of production generates the illusion that the digitizations have not only been pro- tected from editorial intervention, but may even function outside traditional infrastructures of production.” (1520) “In eliding the social processes that constitute the digitizations, not only are the politics of the final product in EEBO obscured, but so too is the possibility of a historical understanding of the project itself. The palimpsesting of the past, present, and everything in between can therefore be understood as part of the dynamic that produces the effect of fact: The performance of EEBO becomes the performance of knowledge.” (1520) Goal for students in assignment: “An archaeology of a digitization, then, should understand the digitally encoded entity as a cultural object, produced by human labor, and necessarily shaped by—and consequently embodying—his- torical circumstance.” (1521) “The digitization emerges as an interface of differing and often opposing narratives and temporalities; consequently, it embodies and stimulates a wide variety of performances in the making of meaning.” (1522)